Past variations in climate and vegetation (RA2)

RA2’s overall aim is to use empirical proxydata of past climate and land cover to evaluate and develop Earth system models and regional, coupled vegetation-climate models. The research also addresses the identification of underestimated or missing processes in Earth System Models.

Photo: Mikael Risendal

The spread of the temperature projections for the next century indicates a considerable uncertainty range for climate sensitivity of different climate models. Improving the knowledge about feedback processes (from e.g. natural and human-induced vegetation changes), regional climate change or the influence of external natural forcing factors (e.g. solar forcing) will narrow down these uncertainties and provide a more solid basis for society and decision makers for the assessment of the urgency and type of implementation measures necessary to mitigate future climate change.

Application of global and regional climate models developed within RA1

Application of extended climate models that use forward modelling of paleoproxies (e.g. water isotopes) and models that include the proposed

relevant processes for studying the solar influence on climate

Cooperation within MERGE RA2 provides real-world data from the past that is crucial for testing the climate and dynamic vegetation models developed within RA1. Advanced statistical methods including spatial statistics (RA4) are applied to interpret paleoclimatic information and to fill the gaps in the point datasets of pollen-based vegetation reconstructions to obtain spatially explicit land-cover descriptions that can be used in climate